I’ll be upfront — Hailee Steinfeld in Sinners I wasn’t sure what to expect when Sinners was first announced. A Ryan Coogler vampire movie set in 1930s Mississippi with Michael B. Jordan playing twins? It sounded either brilliant or completely unhinged. Turns out it was both, in the best way. And somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, Hailee Steinfeld quietly delivered one of the most layered performances of her career.
If you’re curious about her role, the film itself, or just want the full picture, stick around.
A Quick Look at Hailee Steinfeld
She’s been around Hollywood longer than most people realize. Hailee was born December 11, 1996, in Tarzana, Los Angeles, and got her first major role at just 13 years old when she was cast as Mattie Ross in True Grit. That performance earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress — and she was barely a teenager.
Since then she’s kept a pretty relentless pace. The Edge of Seventeen, Bumblebee, the Pitch Perfect series, voice work in the Spider-Verse films, and then Kate Bishop in Marvel’s Hawkeye. Oh, and she’s also a recording artist with legitimate chart hits like “Starving” and “Love Myself.”
Quick Bio
| Detail | Info |
|---|---|
| Full Name | Hailee Steinfeld |
| Born | December 11, 1996 |
| Birthplace | Tarzana, Los Angeles, CA |
| Occupation | Actress, Singer |
| Spouse | Josh Allen (m. May 2025) |
| Children | 1 daughter (b. April 2026) |
| Parents | Cheri Domasin, Peter Steinfeld |
| Uncle | Jake Steinfeld |
What She Does in Sinners
Hailee plays Mary, a woman living in 1932 Jim Crow-era Mississippi who has been “passing” as white. She’s Stack’s ex-girlfriend — Stack being one of the two criminal brothers at the center of the film — and her story threads through some of the movie’s most emotional and disturbing beats.
What made this casting genuinely interesting is that Mary’s racial background isn’t too far removed from Hailee’s own. Her maternal grandfather was half African American and half Filipino, and she’s spoken openly about how taking this role pushed her to look more closely at her own mixed heritage. She described it as bringing her closer to parts of her family history she hadn’t fully explored before. That kind of personal connection doesn’t always show up on screen, but here it does.
Mary is also not a passive character. She’s not there just to give Stack something to care about. She makes choices — some terrible ones — and those choices move the plot forward in significant ways. Without spoiling too much, she becomes something central to the horror itself.
So What Is Sinners, Exactly?
At its core, Sinners is a Ryan Coogler film, which means it’s going to be ambitious and it’s going to have something to say. Coogler wrote and directed it, and it marks his first foray into pure original genre filmmaking — no franchise, no sequel, no IP to lean on.
Set in 1932 Mississippi, the story follows Smoke and Stack, identical twin brothers and World War I veterans who’ve spent years working for the Chicago mob. They come back home with stolen money, buy an old sawmill, and open a juke joint for the local Black community. Their younger cousin Sammie, an aspiring blues musician, joins them. Then an Irish vampire named Remmick shows up, and things go very sideways, very fast.
Describing the genre is a little tricky. It’s a Southern Gothic period drama, a gangster film, a musical, and a supernatural horror movie — sometimes all within the same scene. Coogler has cited From Dusk Till Dawn, No Country for Old Men, and even a Metallica song as influences. The film draws on the real cultural history of the Mississippi Delta, particularly the blues, which isn’t just backdrop — it’s almost a character in itself.
Michael B. Jordan plays both twins, and he’s genuinely good in a way that goes beyond the technical achievement of the dual role. The rest of the ensemble — Miles Caton (in his debut), Wunmi Mosaku, Delroy Lindo, Jack O’Connell, Jayme Lawson — all hold their own. It’s one of those casts where everyone seems to understand what kind of movie they’re making.
Some Production Details Worth Knowing
Filming ran from April to July 2024 in New Orleans, under the deeply unglamorous working title “Grilled Cheese.” The budget eventually climbed to around $90–100 million.
Cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw shot the whole thing on 65mm film — a combination of IMAX and Ultra Panavision 70 cameras, which made her the first woman ever to shoot a feature on large-format IMAX film. The aspect ratio actually shifts throughout the movie, which sounds like a nerdy detail until you see it and realize it genuinely changes how certain scenes feel. Kodak even created a custom 65mm film stock specifically for one flashback sequence.
The costumes came from an unexpected place. Costume designer Ruth E. Carter had originally made many of them for the stalled Marvel Blade reboot. Since both films share a Prohibition-era setting, Coogler was able to repurpose that work — with Marvel’s blessing.
Hailee Also Made a Song for It
Beyond acting, Hailee wrote and recorded an original track called “Dangerous” for the Sinners soundtrack. This was notable partly because she’d been relatively quiet on the music front for a while. The project pulled her back in, and the song fits the film’s tone in a way that feels deliberate rather than tacked on.
The broader soundtrack leaned heavily into authentic blues, with real musicians like Brittany Howard, Buddy Guy, and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram contributing. Much of it was recorded live on set, which gives the musical sequences an energy you can’t really fake in post-production.
How the Film Did
Financially, Sinners exceeded just about everyone’s projections. It opened to $48 million in its first weekend — beating out a holdover Minecraft Movie — and maintained remarkable legs throughout its theatrical run. It crossed $200 million domestically in four weekends, becoming the first original film to do so since Coco in 2017. The worldwide total landed around $370 million.
The audience was broad and diverse. Exit polls showed 49% Black, 27% white, 14% Latino and Hispanic, with a strong showing from younger viewers. A good chunk of tickets were bought same-day, which suggests people were going because a friend told them to, not because of a marketing campaign.
The Critical Response
97% on Rotten Tomatoes from 438 reviews. An 84 on Metacritic. A CinemaScore grade of “A” — the highest given to a horror film in 35 years.
The praise focused on Coogler’s direction, Arkapaw’s cinematography, Jordan’s dual performance, and the music. Some critics felt the supernatural second half didn’t quite match the grounded first, but even those reviews tended to acknowledge how ambitious and genuinely original the whole thing was. Peter Travers called it the best film of 2025 at the time of release.
Hailee’s performance got warm notices too, particularly for the emotional complexity she brought to a role that could have easily been written off as a supporting turn.
Awards Season
The film received 16 Oscar nominations — a record at the time for a single film. It won four: Best Actor (Jordan), Best Original Screenplay (Coogler), Best Cinematography (Arkapaw, making history as the first woman to win in that category), and Best Original Score (Ludwig Göransson).
It also picked up three BAFTAs, two Golden Globes, and won the SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast. At the NAACP Image Awards, it received 18 nominations and 13 wins.
On Hailee’s Personal Life
It’s worth noting that 2025 was a significant year for her outside of the film too. She married Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen in California on May 31, 2025. They’d been dating since 2023, went public in mid-2024, and got engaged that November. In December 2025, they announced a pregnancy, and their daughter was born in April 2026.
So between a career-defining film role, a new marriage, and a baby, she had a fairly eventful stretch.
Final Thoughts
What makes the Hailee Steinfeld and Sinners story interesting isn’t just that she gave a strong performance in a successful movie — though both things are true. It’s that the role genuinely meant something to her personally, and you can feel that in the scenes she’s in. Mary is a complicated figure in a complicated world, and Hailee didn’t play her as a symbol or a plot device. She played her as a person.
Sinners is the kind of film that comes along once in a while and reminds you what big-budget movies can still do when the people making them actually care. For Hailee, it’s another strong entry in a career that’s been building steadily since she was a teenager in a Coen Brothers western.
For more on the film’s full story, production, and awards history, the Sinners (2025 film) Wikipedia page has everything.
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